The Shell Enters a Beauty Contest

I'd never tout the shell as the be-all and end-all of programming languages, but it gets less attention and respect than it deserves.

For example, folks will remark, casually, that shell syntax is ugly. Who would design a language that doesn't even let you put spaces around the '=' in an assignment?

$ x=3

$ y = 3

-bash: y: command not found

$ z= 5

-bash: 5: command not found

Eeew. Real programs are in C. Or Perl. Or Python. Or Haskell. Or ...

Yep, the shell syntax has some design flaws all right. But let's run another beauty contest.

First, contestant #1:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void)
{
int     fd[2], nbytes;
pid_t   pid;

pipe(fd);

if ((pid = fork()) == 0) {
  dup2(fd[0], 0);
  close(fd[1]);
  execlp("/bin/grep", "/bin/grep", "^z", NULL);
} else {
  dup2(fd[1], 1);
  close(fd[0]);
  execlp("/bin/ls", "/bin/ls", "-1", "/bin", NULL);
  wait(NULL);
  exit(0);
}

return(0);
}

Next, contestant #2:

ls /bin | grep ^z

And contestant #1 doesn't even have normal error checking, which would make it much longer, uglier, and hard-to-follow.

Programmers get so used to the shell that they focus on its flaws, but take its virtues for granted.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? -- Joni Mitchell

What tastes of paradise does the shell offer besides pipes? I/O redirection. Ease of process creation. Multi-process programming. Parallelism. Command-line editing. For that matter, the entire idea of a CLI, a "command-line interface."

Once I start listing things, it's hard to stop.

All this in a language you can use in scripts, or just by doing nothing harder than typing at a prompt.